Sunday, May 18, 2008

A cheering section would be nice.

A few nights ago I went out for dessert with some girlfriends that I hadn't seen in ages. We all went to high school together 20 years ago and they are the type of friends that you can go ages without talking to them, but when you do meet up it is like you just talked to them a week ago.

So here we are, the four of us on a night out without our husbands and without our children - and what do we talk about? You guessed it. Men and kids. We mostly talked about kids, and just generally supported each other in the decisions we made regarding parenting. It seems that we constantly run into people who tell us how we should be doing this or that when things are going wrong and yet when we do something right there isn't a whole lot of recognition for the hard work it took to get there.

One of my girlfriends told us about a incident that happened with her son. He had taken to peeing outside - something that I can totally relate to as my boys think that using the bathroom is a major inconveniece when building the dirt super-highway in the backyard. So when her son decided to pee in his sandbox she told him that he needs to come inside to go to the bathroom. So he did, and while he did another pee, she told him that she was just going to go upstairs to get his bath toys so he could play with them in the toilet. "EWWWW....gross" was his reaction. Then she said to him "think about what you did outside" - and the lightbulb went off. So instead of yelling at him to get inside to do his thing, she calmly made her point - and he got it. That was a great parenting moment. Wouldn't it be nice that when we had a great moment with the kids we had our own little cheering section - much like the BC Hydro ads here where they cheer every time you save energy.